Originally published via Armageddon Prose:
In a full face of conspicuous make-up rendering him three shades lighter than normal, current candidate for Ohio governor Vivek Ramaswamy took the stage at a Montana State University Turning Point USA to offer legacy Americans a lecture on the defining characteristics of the country his parents immigrated in the 1970s:
“So what does it mean to be an American in the year 2025? It means we still believe in those ideals of 1776. It means we believe in merit, that the best person gets the job regardless of their genetics, that you are judged not on the color of your skin but on the content of your character and your contributions. It means we believe in the rule of law. And I say this as the proud son of legal immigrants to the United States. That means your first act of entering this country cannot break the law. It means we believe in free speech and open debate without censorship, whether you’re Nick Fuentes or Alex Jones or Jimmy Kimmel. It means that words are not violence, that violence is violence. And violence is never an acceptable response to words. It’s not just about our constitutional principles… That’s America. That’s who we are. It’s about our constitution, but it’s about even more than that. It’s about a culture that is distinctive to our nation. It means we believe in accountability. It means that we are courageous, that we are brave, even heroic, when called upon to serve our country, that we take bold risks. Sometimes we fail, but we still pick ourselves up and do it again. It means we don’t view hardship as the same thing as victimhood. Because hardship from time to time is what teaches us who we really are. It means we are ambitious, to achieve the things we taught to believe were impossible.”
Aside from the littering of platitudes, that’s arguably a decent speech on lofty American values — one of praise that, to be fair, one would never get from anyone on the left.
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However, note that at no point does Ramaswamy mention what the nation-state of America is at its base, which is actually a collection of people who live in America, otherwise known as Americans.
Perhaps that omission was not accidental; Ramaswamy is a huge proponent of importing Third World migrants to occupy American jobs under the pretense that American culture champions mediocrity and laziness, a view he has espoused on X:
“The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture….
This can be our Sputnik moment. We’ve awaken from slumber before & we can do it again. Trump’s election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America, but only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness.
That’s the work we have cut out for us, rather than wallowing in victimhood & just wishing (or legislating) alternative hiring practices into existence. I’m confident we can do it.”
The “America is just an idea” narrative, often referred to as the “propositional nation,” has long been promulgated by neoliberals and progressive social engineers.
Via National Affairs (emphasis added):
“Abraham Lincoln, it seems, was the first to introduce the idea in these terms when he declared that America was “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” But in a broader sense the idea predated Lincoln, as statesmen such as Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, and Henry Clay spoke of the country in similar ways.
When we speak of America as a propositional nation, we refer to the fact that at its origin as a political entity was a pronouncement or proposition (or series of “truths”) that expressed an explicit doctrine of justice to which it then and later has aspired. America is sometimes seen as the exemplary propositional nation. Political scientist Martin Diamond, for example, wrote that the “term Americanism expresses the conviction that American life is uniquely founded on a set of political principles.” Diamond quoted another writer who asserted that “Americanism is…not a tradition or a territory…but a doctrine — what socialism is to a socialist.””
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Leftist proponents of replacement migration are generally not shy about advertising their reason for preferring the propositional nation mythology, which is their naked hatred of white people and Western civilization.
But its right-wing advocates, who largely support it for neoliberal business reasons, are forced to craft more convoluted arguments.
So we get the concept of the “propositional nation”: America is not a place populated by people with a shared history; it’s an idea.
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The benefits of a nation comprised of ideas instead of people are numerous, including that ideas do not require material sustenance.
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
Being that the government’s duty is to provide for the “general Welfare” of the nation, as outlined above, turning that nation into an idea lifts a considerable burden off of the shoulders of the governing authorities. The people can be left to eat the proverbial cake, so long as the sacred idea remains viable in some abstract sense:
Tangentially, but still relevant to the point, does no one in Vivek’s camp have the wherewithal or guts to tell him that he looks like a clown with a pound of powder on his face to pass off as white?
It recalls fellow South Asian Governor Bobby Jindal’s sad campaign slogan from 2015, “Tanned. Rested. Ready.”
Bobby Jindal is not “tan”; he’s ethnically Indian in the same way that caking powder on one’s face does not turn one white.
(Jindal also seemingly had his official gubernatorial portrait lightened to appear more Caucasian so as to make himself more palatable to the Republican base.)
Does everything about politicians have to be fake?
It seems pretty clear that Vivek, a Hindu tech oligarch billionaire Yale Law School graduate, is barking up the wrong tree here with his “aww shucks Mr. Conservative Americana in white powder makeup to lighten my complexion Andy Griffith” routine.
Here is he getting cooked by his own Turning Point audience for “masquerading as a Christian”
Incidentally, how did Vivek Ramaswamy make his billions of dollars?
Blood, sweat, and migrant tears?
Is Ramaswamy a paragon of cultural and moral superiority, as he believes himself to be?
Actually, his first big break was a classic pharmaceutical pump-and-dump scheme, wherein he dug up a drug that had failed no fewer than four clinical trials from the graveyard, slapped some lipstick on it, sold it on television, then dumped his stock before it predictably imploded in trials.
Via Fortune (emphasis added):
“Ramaswamy’s tax records show that the first time he ever made big money was when he hyped up an Alzheimer’s drug candidate, Axovant, which had been discarded by other pharmaceutical companies. Axovant, which was 78% owned by Ramaswamy’s corporate holding company Roivant, blew up after failing FDA tests, with the stock crashing from $200 to 40 cents, fleecing thousands of mom-and-pop investors who bought into the hype. Ramaswamy himself profited handsomely (even if the Ramaswamy campaign took a while to acknowledge the truth).
Ramaswamy spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin first told us that “the idea that Vivek made any money on [Axovant’s] failure is a total lie” before finally acknowledging that Ramaswamy did indeed cash out, claiming “[Ramaswamy] and other shareholders were forced to sell a tiny portion of their shares in 2015 to facilitate an outside investor entering Roivant.” The facts are that Ramaswamy’s own tax returns show he opportunely sold out of nearly $40 million of Roivant stock right as Axovant’s hype was peaking. Meanwhile, Roivant was raising $500 million driven largely by Axovant. As Ramaswamy was busy selling his own personal stake, Roivant gradually reduced and diluted its Axovant stake from 78% to just 25%…
Ramaswamy was not “forced to sell” as that was clearly a personal choice without anyone holding a gun to his head. Amazingly, Ramaswamy’s spokesperson further confirmed to us that Ramaswamy was aware that 99.7% of all drugs tested for Alzheimer’s fail even though he was relentlessly hyping Axovant’s chances of success with nary a mention of that inconvenient truth.”
Pimping bullshit drugs to an unsuspecting public for fast cash is, actually, something of an American tradition, at least in the current age.
So, in all fairness, maybe Vivek’s a real American after all.
Who am I to say?
Apparently America’s just an idea, after all.
Benjamin Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile (now available in paperback), is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.
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